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The killer cosmic rays emitted from nearby supernova explosions may be responsible for at least one mass extinction on Earth, and the discovery of certain radioactive isotopes in the Earth’s crust may confirm this scenario. At least this is what prof. Brian Fields, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In an article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Fields, he describes the theory that the mass extinction 359 million years ago could have been caused by a supernova explosion. The research team focused on the Devonian-Carbon boundary because the rocks derived from it contain hundreds of thousands of generations of spores that appear to be burned by ultraviolet radiation, which may indicate a long-term lack of ozone in the atmosphere. Disasters caused by large-scale volcanism or global warming may also lead to the destruction of the ozone layer, but there is no evidence of such processes in this period of Earth’s history. In our opinion, at l...